by Jill Mansell
Does he know I’m thinking them?
An hour later, she had all the answers she needed, and one more course still to go.
“…so then my ex-wife called me up and told me she was moving back to Oxford. And she asked me for more money, so I said she couldn’t keep doing this. I mean, she’d already gotten me to pay for her to go to Santorini, and that used to be where we went on vacation when we were still together.”
“Oh, Santorini’s great,” Patsy said. “I went there with—”
“So I said to her, God, how can you be so thoughtless? And she just said I shouldn’t be so sensitive, but I mean, how does she expect me to react?”
“Oh dear,” said Patsy. “I’m lucky with my ex-husband. We still get on well and—”
“She does it on purpose to wind me up,” said James. “She’s always been an attention seeker. We went to New York for our honeymoon, and she spent the whole flight chatting up the guy sitting across the aisle from us.”
Maybe a change of subject would help. Patsy said, “So where did you go on vacation when you were a child? Where did your parents—”
“And then when we got back from our honeymoon, I found this new number on her phone with just a P next to it, and when I called it, I recognized his voice. It was the guy from the plane. Whose name was Paolo. You see, that’s what she’s like; that’s what I had to put up with for five years.” James shook his head, besieged with memories of his ex-wife.
“We used to go camping in South Wales.” Patsy gave it one last try. “At a site just outside Tenby. When my little brother was four years old, he had a Superman suit, and one day he jumped off the harbor wall—”
“She told me she loved me,” James said, tears springing into his eyes. “And I was stupid enough to believe her.”
“Yes, but—”
“I can’t get over the way she’s still playing her games. I can’t believe people still fall for them.” He opened his phone and said, “Do you want to see a photo of us on our wedding day?”
The couple at the next table had been eavesdropping; they’d stopped talking to each other and were now sitting with their cutlery poised above their dinner plates. Patsy glanced at her watch—almost nine o’clock—and said, “No thanks.”
It was the first time James hadn’t interrupted her. Mainly because he was scrolling through the photos on his phone, fully intending to show her the pictures of his wedding day anyway.
“Here we are. There she is. Look at her, just look!”
The couple next to them was struggling not to laugh. Patsy didn’t have any photos on her own phone, but purely to entertain herself, she said to James, “Would you like to see some of my wedding photos? I have them right here—”
“Three thousand pounds, that wedding dress cost. She said she wanted to look like a fairy-tale princess, and I told her she’d always be my fairy-tale princess.”
Right on cue, Patsy’s phone began to ring. She said apologetically, “I’d better get this,” and pressed Answer.
“Hi,” said Lily. “This is your nine o’clock call. How’s it going? Is he as nice as you thought?”
How could she have gotten it so wrong, yet again? But Patsy knew why: it was because emails couldn’t be interrupted in mid-sentence. James had written to her, she had replied to him, and the exchanges had continued in an orderly fashion. Not until they’d met up and had a proper verbal conversation had his chronic inability to let anyone else finish a sentence become apparent.
“Oh no, he hasn’t.” Patsy sat back in her chair and looked dismayed. “Really? That’s terrible. And the other leg’s definitely broken? That’s awful. Poor Dan! Is he conscious?”
“That bad?” Lily sounded sympathetic. “Come on, get yourself out of there and come home.”
“Yes, I will. I’ll meet you at the emergency room. See you soon. Bye.” Hanging up, Patsy said, “I’m so sorry, but I have to go. My brother is in the hospital… I need to get there straightaway.”
“You haven’t seen the wedding dress yet. Look at her; there she is. Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Very beautiful. But I’m afraid I have to leave.”
“Funny, isn’t it, how often that happens?” James was barely paying attention, his gaze still fixed on his phone. “Seems like every time I meet someone new, they get a call in the middle of the first date. And it’s always something urgent that means they need to rush off.”
Oh.
The awkward silence was broken only by the smothered snorts of amusement at the next table.
“Well.” Patsy took a couple of twenties out of her purse and put them down beside her plate. “It could have something to do with the way you never listen to a word anyone else says because all you want to talk about is your ex-wife.”
She said it gently, not meanly. But James was too busy gazing at his phone again to notice. With a sigh, he stroked the screen. “Is it any wonder, though? She’ll come back to me one day; I know she will. She’s my princess.”
* * *
“Honestly”—Lily let herself into the cottage—“it’s like babysitting without getting paid.”
“Except I’m toilet trained,” said Dan.
“I do hope so.” He’d called her ten minutes ago, a plaintive message asking her to come over to help him. “What’s the problem, anyway?”
“I want a cup of tea. In the living room. I mean, I can struggle to the kitchen and make a cup of tea. It’s not easy, but I can just about manage it.” Dan gestured helplessly at his leg, his crutch, his strapped-up arm, and, for good measure, his spectacularly black eye. “But I can’t carry it back to the sofa.”
“You poor lamb. Have you tried balancing the cup on your head?”
He gave her a mournful look. “Is that what you want me to do?”
“How about if we get you one of those kids’ plastic trucks you pull along the floor with a piece of string? You could hold the string in your teeth,” Lily said.
“Or I could do that Snow White thing and train small wild animals to carry the cup through to the living room in a basket. Or,” Dan said pointedly, “you could just be kind and do it yourself, to help out your poor disabled friend.”
“Hero friend. You forgot the hero bit.”
“I’m just being modest,” Dan said.
Lily made two mugs of tea, brought them through to the living room, and silently willed him to make some disparaging jokey comment about Eddie Tessler still not having been in touch. She was longing for Dan to say it, bursting to be able to casually reply that, in fact, Eddie had.
But Dan was now talking about the thriller she’d lent him, which was no good at all. Taking her phone out, she began glancing at the screen and turning it over and over in her hands while Dan rattled on about murders and double-crossing tricksters and his own views on who the killer was.
“…OK, the guy was carrying a loaf of bread.” When Dan got involved in a thriller, he really got involved. “So what I’m thinking is, he could have hollowed out the loaf and hidden the gun inside—”
“It’s no good telling me what you think,” said Lily. “You haven’t finished the book yet, so I’m not going to tell you if you’re right.”
“And then when he jumps off the train, I bet he left the gun in the bag of the woman who went to the bathroom…”
“Oh, by the way, did I mention I got a call from Eddie?” She’d tried her level best to contain herself, but the words came blurting out anyway. She’d been holding them in for over thirty-three hours.
“And then the woman came back from the bathroom and slipped the gun into the pocket of the red-headed guy who’d just gotten on the train. Which would explain why there were crumbs in his pocket when they found his body on the tracks.”
There was a framed painting on the wall above his head, a pretty garden scene in acrylics that Coral had p
ainted a few years back, before Nick had died and she’d abruptly abandoned her hobby. For a moment, Lily fantasized about seizing it in both hands and bringing it crashing down, cartoon-style, on Dan’s head.
“Oh! Unless the crumbs are something to do with the parrot…” Dan said.
“Are you listening to me?” Lily demanded. “Did you even hear what I just said?”
Dan looked at her. Finally he nodded. “He called you.”
“Yes!”
“And this is interesting because…?”
“It’s interesting because you told me he wouldn’t. But he did. I mean, no big deal.” She shrugged casually, to demonstrate just how small a deal it was, because it wasn’t as if she’d been desperate for Eddie Tessler to get back in touch. “I’m just letting you know, since you were so sure it wouldn’t happen.”
“So you were right, and I was wrong.” Dan smiled briefly. “And this makes you happy, I can tell.”
“It always makes me happy when you’re wrong.”
“Go on, then. Tell me. Am I right about the handgun being hidden inside the bread?”
No way was she letting him get away with changing the subject. “Yes, that’s exactly how it happened. Clever you. So anyway, Eddie called me yesterday from LA, while I was bidding at the auction. He was pretty funny. And then we had a long chat. Like, for aaaages. He was really interested to hear about Declan too.”
“What time was this? Late morning? Midday?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Pretty standard,” Dan said. “He’s in LA, suffering from jet lag, lying in bed and wide awake at four in the morning with no one over there he can call.”
Lily narrowed her eyes. “He called me because he’d missed talking to me.”
“Correction, he told you he called because he’d missed talking to you.”
“And he’s texted me since then.” This was true; she’d sent him the photo of her mum and Declan as teenagers on the beach, and Eddie had texted back, Amazing!
Which wasn’t much, but technically it counted as a reply. And it wasn’t as if Eddie didn’t have other things on his mind.
“Texted,” Dan said. “Great.”
“He had lunch with Sandra Bullock yesterday.” The logical part of her knew he was being like this on purpose, refusing to seem impressed. But deep down he had to be. And she needed to tell him. It was like when you met someone at a party and they said super-casually, “Oh yeah, I met Shakin’ Stevens at a gas station once. We were lined up at the checkout together… I said hi to him, and he said hi back—seemed like a really nice chap.”
Only much better, of course.
Shakin’ Stevens or Eddie Tessler?
Be honest, which one would you rather boast about knowing?
“At the Chateau Marmont,” Lily continued in the face of Dan’s apparent lack of interest. Eddie hadn’t told her where they were eating, but it had been easy enough to find out. Easy too to delete her Google search history afterward, which was something she would always do from now on. “They’re probably going to do a movie together. Directed by James Cameron. What?” she said impatiently, because Dan was giving her one of his looks.
“You. Have you joined the Eddie Tessler fan club yet? When he flies back here, will you be waiting at the airport with a giant sign, jumping up and down and screaming his name?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.” Lily could feel herself getting irritated all over again. If Dan could have heard Eddie’s voice yesterday when he’d said how much he’d missed talking to her, he wouldn’t be making fun of her like this.
“Hey, don’t be cross with me.” Reaching out with his uninjured leg, Dan gave her foot a gentle nudge. “I’m just saying, that’s all. Don’t get carried away.”
“I didn’t know I was.”
“Well, maybe it’s easier for me to see. Maybe you just don’t want to admit it. But deep down, I think you do know. The way you talked about him on Sunday night. The way you’re reacting now. It’s fine to have a crush on someone out of reach. I just worry that you’re expecting it to…you know, lead to something real.”
“What, with me being so physically repulsive—is that what you’re trying to tell me?” OK, now she was really losing patience. “Because I’m so ugly, no half-decent man could possibly be interested?”
“Oh, come on, you know I don’t mean that. I’m talking about him, not you.”
“You met him for all of thirty seconds,” Lily said.
“He’s a man. A man who is used to getting a lot of attention from the opposite sex.”
“You mean he’s exactly like you,” Lily pointed out. “God help him.”
“Maybe so. But I’m just trying to help.”
“And what you’re basically saying is that someone like Eddie would never be attracted to me.” Lily had discovered that Dan’s habit of plain speaking was much less endearing when the person on the receiving end of his blunt opinions was you.
“I’m not saying that. I’m just pointing out that it wouldn’t be a relationship that necessarily meant a lot to him. And I wouldn’t want to see you getting hurt.”
“Hello?” Lily spread her hands in disbelief. “Why are you even talking about it like this? There is no relationship!”
“Right, fine.” Dan sat back, visibly relieved. “Well, that’s a good thing. Long may it last.” Catching the dangerous glint in her eye, he smiled and said, “For your benefit, not his. You deserve better.”
It was annoying, and she wouldn’t dream of ever admitting it, but maybe he was right. Time to change the subject. “Speaking of deserving better, Patsy’s date wasn’t a success. She’ll be home soon.”
“Did she say what was wrong with him?”
“She couldn’t. He was there when I called.”
“Shall we take bets, then?” Dan’s mischievous smile was back, his attention successfully diverted from the subject of just how far out of her league Eddie Tessler was. “A pound a go, winner takes all?” Counting off on the fingers of his functioning hand, he said, “OK, I’ll start. He implied he was forty, but he’s actually sixty.”
“A stranger to deodorant,” said Lily.
“Wearing a toupee that doesn’t match the rest of his hair.”
“Still married.”
“Eats with his mouth open.”
“Describes his dreams in detail.”
“Wears makeup,” said Dan. “Nothing over the top, just a bit of eyeliner, some mascara, and a nice lipstick.”
See? Having driven her nuts, he was now making her smile again. How annoying was it not even being able to stay cross with him for five minutes?
“And an electronic tag,” Lily said.
Dan thought for a moment, then said, “Or a diaper.”
* * *
Weaver’s Cottage was dilapidated but not disastrously so. It had three bedrooms, one the size of a hamster cage. The kitchen was small, the Formica units ugly and cheap. The wallpaper probably dated from the 1970s, and every room was decorated a different shade of purple, apart from the bathroom, whose fittings were avocado green and matted with dust.
It was the kind of place that caused many people to grimace in distaste and hastily move on to look instead at a nice, clean town house in a brand-new development. But Declan, who had been dealing in property for twenty years, wasn’t put off. The Cotswold stone roof didn’t have actual holes in it, the overgrown garden was small and faced south, and the views from the cottage’s elevated position overlooking the valley were indeed spectacular.
None of this would ever have occurred to him if Lily hadn’t happened to mention it. But she had, and now it almost felt like fate. They’d been texting and emailing, and yesterday he’d told her about having just been outbid at the last minute on a property in Kensington. The deal had fallen through, and now he needed to fi
nd somewhere else to invest in. Lily had said that if he fancied buying something outside of London, there was a cottage coming up for auction on the edge of their village. She’d added that it was in a complete state but had fantastic views and planning permission and could look amazing once it was fixed up.
When he’d found the property online, Declan couldn’t disagree. He’d bought country-based properties before, but not for the last few years. Maybe it would make a nice change to leave behind the hassle of snarled-up traffic and endless parking problems. It would be a sound enough investment; he knew that. There was nothing wealthy Londoners liked more than escaping to a luxurious, beautifully renovated Cotswold cottage over the weekend as a break from their frantic urban lives.
* * *
Coral’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of Declan Madison making his way through the just-opened blue-and-gold iron gates. “Hello! Wow, when you said you were coming down today, I didn’t realize you meant this early!”
Oh, but it was so nice to see him again. She knew he and Lily had been in regular contact, but when he’d called Lily yesterday to let them know he was coming, Coral’s heart had done that skippety-excited thing, and it had felt both thrilling and scary. But common sense had prevailed; as she’d decided after that sleepless night following his first visit, since nothing could come of it, she was simply going to regard him as a practice run and enjoy the fact that her body was showing signs of coming back to life.
Nick wouldn’t mind, she was sure. He would approve.
She greeted Declan with a kiss on the cheek and breathed him in. Hopefully with enough discretion to ensure he didn’t notice.
“I’m early for a reason. Where’s Lily?”
“Driving a vanload of parcels over to the depot. She’ll be back by ten. We weren’t expecting you before eleven.”
“OK, it’ll be done by then.” Declan checked his wristwatch, then glanced over at Marty, who was making himself a coffee in the office. “Do you have to be right here, or could Marty hold the fort for forty minutes?”
Coral found herself transfixed by his gaze, by the something unspoken he seemed to be signaling to her with his dark-ringed steel-gray eyes. For a microsecond, she wondered if Declan was suggesting that Marty might like to hold the fort while he whisked her upstairs to her bedroom for forty minutes of wild, glorious, spectacular—
